Brain cancer, and poverty too

A Chicago man lost his job, home, insurance coverage after being diagnosed with glioblastoma. Now he pins hopes on free care.

July 13, 2008|By Judith Graham, TRIBUNE REPORTER

Curtis King has lost almost everything since being diagnosed with a brain tumor.

His job. His income. His room in a South Side motel. His belongings -- most of them thrown out on the street.

King, 45, has glioblastoma, the same cancer Sen. Edward Kennedy is confronting in Boston with a team of influential associates, friends and family at his side.

In Chicago, King has no one. He lives in a homeless shelter in a room with five strangers, alone with his fear. When he can, King follows what's happening with Kennedy on the Internet, trying to pick up bits and pieces of information that might help him save his life.

Theirs are the two faces of health care in the U.S., men who have virtually nothing in common but an illness that has no cure.

Kennedy has the best medical care this country has to offer, access to any specialist of his choosing and resources to pay for whatever treatments are recommended.

King relies on charity care at Stroger Hospital -- Cook County's medical provider of last resort -- along with handouts and the traits he acquired growing up in Cabrini-Green: toughness, tenacity and a determination to never give up.

"I've been shot, beat up, stabbed. I've been through a lot," said this wiry man with deep scars -- one from a golf club, the other from a baseball bat -- punctuating both eyebrows. "But this cancer, it's worse than all of that."

King's confrontation with the disease began in early March, when he awoke one morning feeling like an insect had alighted on a twitching eyelid. It was an early sign of a seizure, though he didn't know it at the time.

At work at a South Side manufacturing plant a few hours later, King was driving a forklift when his left side suddenly went numb and the vehicle crashed into a wall. An ambulance was quickly called.

At MacNeal Hospital in Berwyn, the MRI scan showed a tennis-ball-size tumor deep in his brain. The surgery removed about half; getting rid of the rest was too dangerous.

"You may not make it to your birthday" in September, King remembers a doctor telling him.

"I haven't been right since," said King, a former gang member who has an extensive criminal record. "I've been past depressed."

A month after his emergency admission, King walked out of rehabilitation carrying a prescription for chemotherapy pills that cost $9,000 a month -- a charge his union-based insurance wouldn't cover and he couldn't pay when the pharmacist told him it was his responsibility.

"I never had a problem like this. I didn't know what to do," he said.

Looking for help, King walked into the emergency room at Stroger Hospital in early April, where doctors took another set of scans and staff signed him up for free therapy and medications, which he continues to take. "I had to try to save myself," he said.

"Every day, I wake up and feel like I'm going to fight this cancer," said King, who dresses to impress and walks with a swagger, concealing the headaches that are sometimes so intense he can barely stand.

"I ain't working for a brand new pair of [Air] Jordans; I don't think about that material stuff," he said. "I'm working to live. That's my job."

Realistically, doctors say, there is no chance of recovery.

Glioblastoma is especially difficult to treat because glial cells infiltrate the brain, casting a wide net like a spider web, said Dr. Nathaniel Holloway, a radiation oncologist at Stroger.

Even when surgeons cut the malignancy away, cancer cells remain at the periphery, almost impossible to distinguish from normal brain tissue. Inevitably, they proliferate, and the cancer recurs.

"Because of the nature of this disease, patients just don't do well," Holloway said, noting the goal of therapy is to "prolong the period when patients are symptom-free."

King's tumor already has grown back once, expanding rapidly over the course of two months and requiring another bout of brain surgery in mid-May. Soon after the surgery, his union-based coverage ended and King became uninsured.

It was while recovering from this operation in the hospital that he first heard news of Kennedy's seizure.

"I said, 'I bet he got what I got,'" King remembered thinking, "and he better be careful, man, because it's not easy.

"Then I was trying to find out as much as I can, to see what kind of treatment they're giving him, because I definitely want it too. ... But in my mind, I was asking: 'Can he handle it?' Because he's older, and if he's got the headaches I have, it could kill him."

Once, King wouldn't have admitted being in pain. Now he talks about how loud noises feel like an assault and how he couldn't get down the stairs at an "L" station recently because he was too exhausted from radiation therapy.

On a recent morning, he squinted at his left hand and opened and closed his fist repeatedly.